Optical sensing systems often find use in machine guarding and area monitoring applications, although they are not limited to such applications. Regardless of the general application, a specific sensor installation generally requires the selection of one or more configuration options. Such options include choices about how the sensor behaves at start-up, or upon reset, how it behaves responsive to detection events, etc.
The selections made for the configurable operating parameters define the overall configuration of the sensor system. At least some types of parameters are changed infrequently. For example, parameters defining how a given sensor system should behave at startup may be set as part of initial installation, and then left unchanged. It is known, for example, to provide sensor systems with DIP switches, jumper circuits, etc., that allow an installer or authorized user to make static configuration selections. However, DIP switches are expensive and hard to include in a mechanical design so that the ingress protection (IP) ratings are maintained. Moreover, the possible configuration settings available from DIP switches are practically limited, particularly where safety-critical switch redundancy is required. In addition, it is difficult to add new features to DIP switch configurations without changing hardware.
It is also known to provide electronic configuration devices that couple to sensor systems and allow configuration settings to be downloaded to the system from the configuration devices or otherwise selected using them. However, many users need to configure their optical sensing systems very rarely and thus they do not want to incur the cost or hassle of complex external programming devices. In still other approaches, systems are factory pre-configured systems to tailor them to given customer needs.